Kōtarō Yoshida (吉田 鋼太郎, Yoshida Kōtarō; born January 14, 1959, in Tokyo) is a Japanese actor and theatre director. He established himself on the stage in classical theatre, becoming a regular in Yukio Ninagawa's Shakespeare productions and co-founding the theatre company Performance Unit AUN in 1997. Television roles in Hanzawa Naoki (2013) and Hanako to Anne (2014) brought him wider recognition and led to frequent film and television work. In 2016 he succeeded Ninagawa as the second artistic director of the Sai no Kuni Shakespeare Series. He is affiliated with Horipro.
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Biography
Yoshida spent six years in Osaka during his grade school days, and later grew up in Hino, Tokyo. While a student at St. Paul High School, he saw the Shakespearean comedy "Twelfth Night" by the Kumo Theater Company and decided to become an actor. While studying at the Department of German Literature in the Faculty of Literature at Sophia University, he made his debut by performing Twelfth Night in the Shakespeare Study Group. He later dropped out of the university.
After working with the Shiki Theatre Company for six months, he worked with Shakespeare Theatre, Lyming Theatre Company, and Tokyo Ichigumi before forming Performance Unit AUN with director Yoshihiro Kurita in 1997, which he also directed. He was valued as an actor capable of performing the roles required of foreign classics such as Shakespeare and Greek tragedies, and was a regular in Yukio Ninagawa's productions. His roles for Ninagawa included Titus in a Japanese-language production of Titus Andronicus that played the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 2006. He is a close friend of Tatsuya Fujiwara and Shun Oguri, who often appeared in Ninagawa's works. Starting in 2010, he expanded his activities into television dramas and films on the advice of Oguri.
Yoshida played Hanzawa's boss in Hanzawa Naoki in 2013 and Densuke Kanō, who was modeled after businessman Den'emon Itō, in Hanako to Anne in 2014. These performances attracted attention, which led to an increase in his appearances in films, his first starring role being in Tokyo Sentimental.
He married on January 1, 2016, a woman 22 years his junior, and held a wedding ceremony in February 2017. In October 2016, he succeeded Yukio Ninagawa as the second artistic director of the Sai no Kuni Shakespeare Series.
